Disclaimer: All the opinions expressed in this article are
the opinions of Dr. Seshadri Kumar alone and should not be construed to mean
the opinions of any other person or organization, unless explicitly stated
otherwise in the article.

*********************************

No, this is not a review of the famous, wrongly-named book
by A.L. Basham, in which he used the word India instead of the more correct Bharatvarsha.
This is an attempt to educate modern Indians about the glory of their culture
by revealing new insights that have resulted from the work of tireless
researchers around the globe on the origins of civilization. And all roads of
inquiry lead only to one conclusion – that the source of all civilizational
greatness in the world is India.

For too long, India has been cast as the land of
snake-charmers, tigers, and elephants. For centuries, westerners have mocked
India for its backwardness. However, recent SCIENTIFIC discoveries have
established that India was more advanced than any other country in the world in
antiquity.

Join me as I reveal the story of hitherto unknown (or little
known) scientists, who languish in their quiet academic environs because their
momentous discoveries have not been given the credit they deserve. This article
is a humble attempt to cast light on their collective greatness and the
earth-shaking importance of the seminal work they have done.

I hope you enjoy this article as much as I did writing it.
Anything that is good in the article should not be ascribed to me – for I am
merely a messenger – it should be ascribed to the great scientists who have revealed
so much for us to learn and whose work you are going to discover through this
article.

So, without further ado, let me begin telling you about the
recent momentous discoveries that have established, once and for all, why
Bharatvarsha was the greatest civilization ever on the planet.

The IVC
and the Aryan Invasion/Migration Controversy

The Indus Valley
Civilization (IVC) is one of the oldest civilizations of mankind. Although
there have been older human settlements on the planet than the IVC, the IVC can
fairly be said to be the cradle of all civilizations because of the range and
depth of the ideas it brought forth (this will be made clear in the following).
This is the civilization to which modern India owes its existence. So it is
meaningful to look at what this civilization was all about and what it has
bequeathed us.

The IVC was first discovered in Harappa, now in Pakistan, with
later discoveries in Mohenjo-daro,
also in Pakistan, Lothal in
Gujarat in India, and various other places. While initially these discoveries
were greeted with great excitement, as it gave Indians a view of what seemed to
be their antiquity, this fond hope was soon dashed when archaeologists
investigated the artifacts in depth.

The reason was that India is largely a country of Hindus,
with significant minorities that made their homes in India due to migration and
conquest; but essentially, India was the land of the Hindus. The Hindu epics
(itihasas) such as the Mahabharata
and the Ramayana spoke of
an ancient civilization that Hindus held to be around 5000 years old. The
discovery of the IVC gave Hindus a lot of hope that this was the proof of the
ancient civilization they were looking for. Unfortunately, some key archaeological
facts went against them – or seemed to at the time.

The
Absence of the Horse

One key point of variancewas that the Hindu scriptures, right from the time of the Rig Veda, the
most ancient scripture, spoke of “Ashvas” – that were translated as “horses”
everywhere in the epics. The IVC carvings and drawings showed no evidence of
any horses, though there seemed to be some strange one-horned animals drawn in
the reliefs and tablets, in addition to identifiable buffaloes. See figure
below for an example.